Inbound Marketing to improve interest in public postgraduate courses

Abstract

This research seeks to explore the potential of applying Inbound Marketing techniques with the aim of increasing the demand for postgraduate educational programmes. This communication technique, widely used in the business world to attract customers in virtual environments, has scarcely been applied at all in the public education sector. Therefore, this work aims to provide scientific evidence to fill this gap, with a twofold objective: (1) to verify the benefits of applying this marketing technique to a different business environment and (2) to analyze whether after designing a specific route for the visitor, a conversion is achieved. Two marketing strategies are proposed: (1) improving the positioning of search engines using SEO techniques and (2) creating attractive content on sites with a sufficient volume of qualified users. Both strategies should lead to an improvement in the conversion rate in public master’s degrees and postgraduate programmes. The methodology proposed to achieve these objectives is action research, its scope of action being the official Master’s Degree in Business Management at the Pablo de Olavide University. We highlight how, after implanting the Inbound Marketing technique, more than 1000 visits were achieved, as well as a conversion rate of 2.12%. This study ends with the presentation of the conclusions and the academic and practical implications of these results. (English) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]